sambista
Joined: 25 Sep 2004 Posts: 16951 Location: way station of life
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Posted: 02/27/15 7:12 am ::: Building the First Slavery Museum in America |
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i started reading this story because of the topic, but ultimately i was so enthralled by the writing that the story nearly took a back seat. you all know i post a bunch of stories i think others will find interesting - and, yes, the majority of them are from the new york times because, imo, they have some of the best damned writers - but i'm posting this one for anyone who's in search of the secrets of good writing. this is a long piece, because there's so much to be told, yet the words are so beautifully, effortlessly woven, and economized, that you're propelled forward by anticipation.
so, in big snippets, here's the news value:
david amsden, for the new york times, wrote: |
Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, was among those to address the crowd on opening day. He first visited the Whitney as the state’s lieutenant governor in 2008, when the project was in its infancy, and at the time he compared its significance to that of Auschwitz. Now he was speaking four days after a grand jury in New York City declined to indict a police officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, a black man who was stopped for selling untaxed cigarettes; 13 days after another grand jury in Missouri cleared an officer in the shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager; and two weeks after Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland park, was killed by a police officer. Evoking the riots and protests then gripping the nation, Landrieu said, “It is fortuitous that we come here today to stand on the very soil that gives lie to the protestations that we have made, and forces us as Americans to check where we’ve been and where we are going.”
The mayor concluded his speech by extending his hand to an older man standing just offstage to his left. Stocky and bespectacled, with a thick head of unkempt white hair, John Cummings was as much a topic of conversation among those gathered as the Whitney itself. For reasons almost everyone was at a loss to explain, he had spent the last 15 years and more than $8 million of his personal fortune on a museum that he had no obvious qualifications to assemble.
“Like everyone else,” John Cummings said a few days earlier, “you’re probably wondering what the rich white boy has been up to out here.” |
and here's a taste of why it's such a delicious read. just look at the wealth of information beautifully packaged in a single paragraph:
david amsden, for the new york times, wrote: |
He was driving around the Whitney in his Ford S.U.V., making sure the museum would be ready for the public. Born and raised in New Orleans, Cummings is as rife with contrasts as the land that surrounds his plantation. He is 77 but projects the unrelenting angst of a teenager. His disposition is exceedingly proper — the portly carriage, the trimmed white beard, the florid drawl — but he dresses in a rumpled manner that suggests a morning habit of mistaking the laundry hamper for the dresser. As someone who had to hitchhike to high school and remains bitter about not being able to afford his class ring, he embodies the scrappiness of the Irish Catholics who flooded New Orleans in the 19th century. But as a trial lawyer who has helped win more than $5 billion in class-action settlements and a real estate magnate whose holdings have multiplied his wealth many times over, Cummings personifies the affluence and power held by an elite and mostly white sliver of a city with a majority black population. |
Builidng the First Slavery Museum in America
_________________ no justice, no peace.
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